Southern Red Shirts

The Southern Red Shirts were white supremacist paramilitary groups in the United States that existed from 1875 to 1900 in the American South. The Red Shirts were first formed in Mississippi as Southern Democratic gangs which had the goal of threatening white and black members of the US Republican Party during elections. In 1876 and 1878, the Red Shirts supported the Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina, Wade Hampton, during clashes against Republican voters, and they also intimidated North Carolina voters until the 1900 gubernatorial election. Unlike the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts were not an underground organization, but a collection of gangs of white supremacists.